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CHICAGO—As the NHL’s Western final got underway in Chicago this week, there were those who theorized the story of the series would be written at centre ice.

Blackhawks centreman Jonathan Toews and his L.A. counterpart Anze Kopitar have much in common.

Both are finalists for the Selke Trophy as the league’s best defensive forward, although Toews stands alone as the current holder of the award. Both are recent winners of a Stanley Cup, although Toews has two rings to Kopitar’s one. It stood to reason that the one who rose to the moment might lead his team to a berth in another league final.

“If we want to win this series, Kopi is going to have to win that battle,” Drew Doughty, the Kings top defenceman, told reporters this week.

Two games into the proceedings, the Toews-Kopitar showdown has mostly been a saw-off. The Toews line — which usually includes wingers Marian Hossa and Bryan Bickell — is among the least of L.A.’s worries. The Kopitar-centred unit, rounded out by Marian Gaborik and Dustin Brown, is hanging in fine.

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“It’s a pretty even matchup, I think,” Darryl Sutter, the Kings coach, was saying on Tuesday, speaking of the clash of No. 1 units. “It’s not that for us. It’s after that.”

“After that” indeed, is where the Blackhawks appear to have separated themselves from most of the rest of the league. “After that” includes forward depth enough to make Patrick Kane a second liner. “After that” includes a defensive corps that’s skilled and fast and deep.

Whether or not the Kings have enough talent up and down their roster to match — and Jeff Carter’s hat-trick explosion on Wednesday reminded folks that L.A. has pop beyond Kopitar et al — is an open question. Certainly if the Kings hadn’t pulled off Wednesday’s heroics — coming from 2-0 down in the second period’s final two minutes to win 6-2 and even the series at 1-1 — this week would be devoted to ruminations on Chicago’s impending coronation.

Think about it. If the Blackhawks had maintained the dominance of Wednesday’s opening 38 minutes during the closing 22 — well, home teams that win the opening two games of an NHL best-of-seven have historically closed out at an 89 per cent rate. Chicago, with a win on Wednesday, would have been 8-0 at home in the playoffs. And given that they’ll have home advantage should they advance to the championship series, it would have been difficult to fathom either Eastern finalist having anything but faint hope.

Everything’s different now that the deadlocked series is shifting back to Hollywood. Then again, if you trace history back to the 2009-10 season, when the Blackhawks won their first of their two most recent Cups, one thing hasn’t changed much: The Kings, Wednesday’s victory aside, haven’t had much luck against Chicago.

Chicago took last year’s Western final against L.A. in five games. The Blackhawks swept this year’s regular-season series 3-0. If you add up their most recent playoff and regular-season meetings going back to and including 2009-10, Chicago has won 18 of its past 24 games against L.A.

“We’ve been dominated by this team over the last couple of years,” Brown said.

Try the past five.

Maybe depth and defensive mobility is the difference. And maybe the first-line matchup is telling — although not only from the perspective of Toews and Kopitar. While the Kings have often sent out their top defensive pairing of Drew Doughty and Jake Muzzin against the Toews line, the Blackhawks have shown frequent faith in the shutdown prowess of their second duo of Johnny Oduya and Niklas Hjalmarsson. Both are Swedish Olympians. And their presence on the ice, often against opposing team’s top line, allows Chicago’s top pair of Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook to operate with more of an offensive focus.

The strategy — and most other NHL coaches would call it an unimaginable luxury — has been more than effective. At times Chicago’s speed, coupled with Keith’s deft quarterbacking, has looked unstoppable. And L.A.’s sudden case of self-belief won’t necessarily make them skate faster, although Chicago goalie Corey Crawford’s not-so-impressive work in Game 2 will certainly underline the imbalance in goaltending talent that’s tilted in favour of L.A.’s Jonathan Quick, not to mention the importance of driving traffic and pucks to Chicago’s goalmouth.

There were voices in the Kings dressing room suggesting that the drubbing the Kings absorbed in Wednesday’s opening 38 minutes was a reminder of a long-ago revelation.

“You can’t play a rush game with that team. If we want to play back and forth, rush after rush, we’re going to lose games,” Doughty said. “We need to play a possession game. We need to get in on our forecheck and always have . . . position.”

Positioning is a key point with the Blackhawks — give them a step and they’re too often blazing to the net. Jarret Stoll, the Kings forward, said L.A.’s forecheck was at times too aggressive on Wednesday; they’d over-commit to the possibility of a big hit, only to watch Chicago’s nimble defencemen step brush by the contact and promptly out of the zone.

“That’s something we can’t have happen,” Stoll said.

L.A. can’t be counted out. In eliminating the Sharks and Ducks after trailing those series 3-0 and 3-2, respectively, they’ve proven themselves to be the league’s most unflappable unit — a team that’s taken on the personality of its backend leader.

“If (Doughty) makes a mistake — which is an ‘if’ — he just lets it roll of his back,” Blackhawks forward Patrick Sharp said of Doughty, with whom he was teammates on Canada’s gold-medal Olympic squad. “He continues to do whatever he wants out there.”

It’ll be worth watching to see how the Kings go about stopping the Blackhawks from doing what they want to do, which is win their third Cup in five years and cement their status as the first real dynasty of the salary-cap era.

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